surchs writes

Hi,

I have just discovered recoll and find it to be an extremely useful addition to a markdown based workflow for searchability. My only comment is that doing a search is a bit involved (open gui, focus searchbar, type query, click on result).

My suggestion would be to provide the recoll-index based search as a [search-provider for gnome](https://developer.gnome.org/SearchProvider/). I believe that something like this may already work on Unity but since Ubuntu will be moving to vanilla gnome in the future this may reach a wider audience soon.

medoc writes

Just 2 remarks about general usability:

  • On my desktop (xfce), recoll comes up with the focus in the search bar, you can type away at once. I don’t know why this does not work under Gnome. The result-list is also navigable with the keyboard, but at this point you’re probably better off with the mouse (except if you can’t use one of course).

  • There is a script to bind a hot key to recoll search: https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll/wiki/HotRecoll. I have not tried it recently with Gnome though, but it definitely used to work under gnome, kde and xfce (at least).

Agreed, this is not the same thing as an integrated search provider. This should not be very difficult to implement over the Python interface (like the Unity module). I may give it a try if you don’t feel like doing it ?

medoc writes

I had a look at this, and I don’t think that there is a good match between the search provider idea and recoll: each app is supposed to supply a search provider, and docs will be activated within the app. That’s very different from the cross-app recoll search. This plus I don’t really want to go up the dbus+gnome learning curve.

If someone wants to do this, the Python Recoll API is there for them and I’ll gladly assist !